Exported PDF with layered blend modes

[Tommy Turtle]

Hello all,

 

I'm experiencing an issue which I am consistently able to reproduce that I hope you can help me with - 

 

If I add a picture frame to a document and overlay a rectangle filled with a gradient and set the blend mode of the rectangle to say, hard light the results I see when I export to PDF are completely different to what is expected. if I export to any other format, I get the correct colours and if I select to flatten the PDF file then I also get the correct colours.

 

Any ideas what's going on here?

 

elements.pdf

[Jon P]

Hi @Tommy Turtle,

Apologies in the delay getting back to you.

If you are still able to reproduce this in the latest beta is it possible to attach the document you are exporting from along with the export settings you are using and I will take a look?

Thanks

[DiggerJapan]

I have this exactl same problem with exporting blend mode layers to a PDF. It looks really bad in any non Adobe PDF reader. Is there a fix for this?

[Jon P]

If you upload it here i'll take a look, can you also clarify what settings you are exporting to and what reader you are using. 

[DiggerJapan]

Hi

Thanks a lot. I uploaded the file to your dropbox link.

If viewed in Adobe Acrabat its fine. In the apple default preview viewer it looks like screen shot shown below.

Another person in a post I opened myself also noted that in non Adobe PDF readers it looks like below. It only shows properly in Adobe Acrobat.

The issue seems to be with the rendering of the blend mode layers in PDFs. If i render a flat PDF or any other type of image file Jpeg, tiff etc its fine.

I have tried all settings from web to print to X4 with various options checked and unchecked it seems to make no difference.

Any help on this issue or work arounds would be amazing as i fear i will have to remake in illustrator for safety otherwise.

Thank you so much!

[Jon P]

My initial thoughts (and what is discussed in the other thread) are that this is a PDF viewer issue (see here), some viewers like Apples preview can struggle with CMYK, transparency etc.

If you export flattened versions of the layers it should view more consistently between viewers, which might be advisable with the size/type of document you have anyway.

[DiggerJapan]

Hi Jon

Thanks for looking in to this. That would make sense, as the preview viewer probably isnt designed for viewing PDFs like this. The fact it displays in Acrobat properly would also support your idea. Thanks for the feed back.

Kind regards